How the Absence of Shame Weakens Democracy

In the past two decades, “Moneyball”-style thinking has spread, and nearly every part of American life seems to have found its own version of “he gets on base.” Calculations are completed, and the answer is immutable. A more nuanced view—one that considers, for example, that Oakland actually was so successful in large part because of three great young pitchers who had all been scouted by the old guard—almost always gives way to the dogma of the quants. When brutal rationalism is challenged, especially by traditionalists, its defenders will often justify themselves by pointing to the intelligence of its adherents. The message is, We are the smart ones who understand the math of on-base percentage, and all of the heretics who talk about “watchability” or even say that it’s good for a sport to be entertaining are stupid.

But this notion of intelligence contains a whole set of assumptions about what is valuable. Here’s another sports-related story, closer to home. I recently had a conversation with a fellow-parent about paying for parking and admission at their children’s youth basketball games. If they wanted to watch their kids play, they needed to pay twenty-five dollars for parking and another twenty dollars per person just to get in the gym. I said that this was gross behavior and that such things would never have been allowed back in our childhoods. The other parent, who was equally disturbed but perhaps a bit less emotional, said, “Yeah, they’re just being smart, I guess.”

“Smart” is how brutal rationality is justified to the public. The public might still hate what’s being done, but they will accept that that’s how the world works today. Of course, charging for parking and admission at a kid’s basketball game is a low-level version of extractive efficiency when compared to, say, the way that corporations treat their employees. But we experience the loss of shame most intensely in these personal moments when that loss intrudes into spaces we thought of as sacred, such as our children’s play.

The discontent we feel about so much of modern society is the failure of shame to triumph over “smart.” We feel alienated precisely because we can’t shame the organizers of the basketball league to stop charging for parking just because they can.

Last week, I appeared on a public-radio show with a psychology professor from the University of British Columbia, Jessica Tracy, who does not think that public shaming is particularly useful or productive. She pointed out how many lives had been derailed by shame on social media, and suggested that we should not rely on a groundswell of public discontent to police horrible behavior; instead, she argued, the government and official bodies should act to enforce norms. Of course, the state and other official bodies know when to step in only because of public shame; the N.B.A., for example, would not make anti-tanking rules if there was no public outcry. More important, it seems unwise to ask a corruptible government to both set the agenda and to enforce the social code.

It’s true that social media can function as the ultimate shaming machine. But its real-world effects are almost entirely heaped upon the unlucky individuals who briefly become the internet’s main character. The social norms it enforces with such viciousness might show up in human-resources documents, but the past decade that has followed the peak of online shaming has shown us just how flimsy those social norms really were. Do you look around in whatever city or town you live in and see evidence that social-media shaming has made people more submissive to a shared set of social norms? Or do you see influencers invading personal space, people rudely taking out their phones in the middle of conversations with actual people, and theatrical, internet-incentivized, constantly filmed conflict? The attention economy of social media, and the ease with which anyone can now record anything, has made us far more shameless. That seems obvious enough.